Gifts for Guantánamo

What do you buy for a Canadian child who is being held in Guantánamo? The Canadian government seems to have had trouble with that one. In 2003, when two of its intelligence officers visited Omar Khadr, a boy from Toronto who had recently turned sixteen, at the base, where he had been for several months, they brought him a Big Mac value meal. (Then they interrogated him for the benefit of the U.S.) Another Canadian bureaucrat tried to “bribe him with chocolate bars,” as Maclean’s magazine put it. But that’s not all. Maclean’s obtained some government documents showing that Canada spent twenty-one hundred dollars (Canadian) on “comfort items” for Khadr. The specific goods are mostly blacked out, but they include moisturizer. And:

In October 2007, Nancy Collins, a case management officer, spent $113.94 preparing a “care package” for the Toronto native. She photographed the contents, emailed them to U.S. officials for approval, and shipped the parcel with a tracking number. For the next four months, it was lost in transit. When the box finally arrived in Cuba in February, “the contents were covered in green mould, stank up the [staff judge advocate] office, and had to be tossed.”

A moldy package that stank up the JAG office—that is an apt image for the Khadr case. What none of those Canadians came bearing was a coherent strategy for getting their minor citizen out of limbo, or seeing that justice might be done, even though he is widely regarded in Canada as a child soldier. (And two Edmonton lawyers, who gained Khadr’s trust in a conversation involving hockey, have been fighting for him in Canadian courts.) Khadr had been picked up half dead after a firefight in Afghanistan the year before. He was in the area because his father, an Al Qaeda associate, took him there. An American soldier was killed in the skirmish, and Khadr was accused of throwing the grenade (it is not at all clear that he did). He was first brought to Bagram, where he says he was abused. A witness known as Interrogator No. 1 admitted, in a hearing in Guantánamo this month, that he told Khadr that a young person in his position might end up gang-raped if he didn’t say what interrogators wanted to hear. Then, in late 2002, he was brought to Guantánamo, where he has been ever since.

Astoundingly, the case of an abused child soldier is the first one the Obama Administration is bringing under its new military tribunals. Perhaps they were too ashamed to bring it in a real court—but that’s no excuse.

The Times, in an editorial Monday, wished that the Administration would just make some sort of deal so that this case would go away. As Spencer Ackerman notes, such negotiations have been taking place. The Administration must also have considered the possibility that Khadr could be acquitted even by a wildly imperfect military tribunal. If so, would he become a test not just for the tribunals but for the Administration’s theory that it can hold prisoners without any recourse at all?

It hasn’t been much of a test for openness. Carol Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald, writes that the hearings

opened with a new rule book and closed with the Pentagon banishing four veteran reporters. One of the witnesses was subpoenaed in secret, six testified under pseudonyms, and security officers closed the court to screen a video available on YouTube.

Rosenberg was one of those four banned reporters, along with Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star; Paul Koring of The Globe and Mail; and Steven Edwards of Canwest. Their supposed offense was revealing the identity of Interrogator No. 1. That was an absurd complaint, because his name had been widely published—for example, in connection with abusing another prisoner, who died. The restrictions on the video were just as farcical:

Canadian attorney Nate Whitling didn’t have the court-approved clearances to watch it either—even though he provided the version viewed in secret session by burning it onto a DVD at the trailer park where lawyers live below the hilltop tribunal building.

The video in question was of the visit by the Canadian intelligence officers—the ones who brought the Big Mac. When he first saw them, Khadr thought that they were there to help him. When he realized that they weren’t, and weren’t taking his account of abuse seriously, he began to cry.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.